The new Google Maps application for the iPhone became the most downloaded free item in Apple‘s App Store on Thursday, just hours after its launch.

The long-awaited app launched in the early hours of Thursday morning, finally bringing relief to the millions of iPhone users forced to rely on Apple’s own much-maligned mapping system.

The popularity of Google Maps provided an insight into the unpopularity of Apple’s own attempt at providing a map service. Its launch came after Apple ditched its partnership with Google ahead of the launch of iOS6, the most recently launched operating system for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch.

“People around the world have been asking for Google Maps on iPhone,” wrote Daniel Graf, director of Google Maps for Mobile in a thinly veiled dig at Apple’s own geographical travails.

“Starting today, we’re pleased to announce that Google Maps is here – rolling out across the world in the Apple App Store. It’s designed from the ground up to combine the comprehensiveness and accuracy of Google Maps with an interface that makes finding what you’re looking for faster and easier.”

Early reviews of Google Maps were overwhelmingly positive. The New York Times described it as “free, fast and fantastic,” concluding that “Google Maps for iPhone is an astonishingly powerful, accurate, beautiful tool”.

The Next Web said the new tool was “pleasantly responsive and feature-rich,” although noted “a few rough spots that suggest it’s been rushed ahead to market”.

The early response to Google Maps is in stark contrast for the widespread despair provoked by Apple’s own attempt at building a mapping system.

Users reported that railway stations had been imagined, the Sears Tower in Chicago had been mislabelled, Paddington Station in London had ceased to exist and searches for ‘London’ directed UK iPhone users to the Canadian London in Ontario, rather than Britain’s teeming metropolis.

Google Maps had been an inbuilt part of the iOS operating system until this year’s update. Apple decided not to renew its licence with Google, reportedly frustrated that Google had refused to allow it access to its voice-directed turn-by-turn navigation and vector graphics for mapping.

Like this:

Apple CEO Tim Cook has admitted the company could have done better with its Maps application and has even suggested customers use Google Maps instead, which the company dropped from its latest operating system.

In a letter released by Mr Cook, he apologised for the frustration the feature had caused and said Apple had ‘fallen short’.

‘At Apple, we strive to make world-class products that deliver the best experience possible to our customers,’ he wrote in a document posted on the company’s official website.

‘With the launch of our new Maps last week, we fell short on this commitment.

‘We are extremely sorry for the frustration this has caused our customers and we are doing everything we can to make Maps better.’

The Apple boss recommended users try alternatives such as ‘ Google or Nokia maps by going to their websites and creating an icon on your home screen to their web app.’

The US tech giant dropped Google Maps from iOS6 after having it pre-installed on previous versions of the operating system.

He added Apple was continuing to improve its map software and the more people used it, the better it would get.

Users complained the new maps feature was not as detailed or as accurate as Google’s.

Well I googled around about this story and the rumour is that the fall out began because Google were adding features to the Andriod version of maps , BUT NOT the iOS version – so Apple being the way they are said screw you guys – and developed it’s own maps app!

While conventional search engines ranked results by counting how many times the search terms appeared on the page, the two theorized about a better system that analyzed the relationships between websites.[26] They called this new technology PageRank, where a website’s relevance was determined by the number of pages, and the importance of those pages, that linked back to the original site.[27][28]

A small search engine called “RankDex” from IDD Information Services designed by Robin Li was, since 1996, already exploring a similar strategy for site-scoring and page ranking.[29] The technology in RankDex would be patented[30] and used later when Li founded Baidu in China.[31][32]

Page and Brin originally nicknamed their new search engine “BackRub“, because the system checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site.[33][34][35]

Eventually, they changed the name to Google, originating from a misspelling of the word “googol“,[36][37] the number one followed by one hundred zeros, which was picked to signify that the search engine wants to provide large quantities of information for people.[38] Originally, Google ran under the Stanford University website, with the domains google.stanford.edu and z.stanford.edu.[39][40]

The domain name for Google was registered on September 15, 1997,[41] and the company was incorporated on September 4, 1998. It was based in a friend’s (Susan Wojcicki[25]) garage in Menlo Park, California. Craig Silverstein, a fellow PhD student at Stanford, was hired as the first employee.[25][42][43]

In May 2011, the number of monthly unique visitors to Google surpassed 1 billion for the first time, an 8.4 percent increase from May 2010 (931 million).[44]